Hetty Green: The Richest Woman in America

By 1885, everyone knew Hetty Green’s name. She was 50 years old and considered to be the wealthiest woman in America.

Today, the money is long gone. But her name, which disappeared soon after her death in 1916, is back. And with it comes a new reputation, according to biographer Janet Wallach, who released “The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age” on September 25 and discovered a new side to the millionaire who was once dubbed “The Witch of Wall Street.”

“Everything that had been written about her made her sound like this bizarre creature and I thought, ‘No human being could really be this way,’” Ms. Wallach recalled during a recent telephone interview from her home in Manhattan. “She was described as so monstrous and she was so demonized. I thought, ‘It doesn’t make sense.’ What I wanted to do was humanize her, to make a human being out of somebody who had been just completely, I think, misunderstood.”

Ms. Wallach dove into her research five years ago while at her second home in Amagansett. She surrounded herself with stacks of old books about Ms. Green, née Howland Robinson, and the Gilded Age as she either sunned in the backyard during the summer or bundled up by the fireplace in the winter.

There was one major setback: Ms. Green didn’t leave anything behind. No journals, no diaries, no letters and no personal jottings. Ms. Wallach was forced to dig and depended heavily on hundreds of newspaper clippings and magazine features written during the age of yellow journalism, as well as those of Ms.

Green’s friends’ autobiographies, to get inside the millionaire’s head.

What Ms. Wallach discovered shocked her. Contrary to popular belief, Ms. Green was actually a decent person with a sense of humor, warmth and intelligence. And some people really admired her. That’s not to say the multimillionaire wasn’t eccentric and odd, Ms. Wallach emphasized. But she was a woman. She had feelings. She had fears and an interesting sense of self, she said, noting Ms. Green never spent money just to show off.

And of most importance to the biographer, Ms. Green had an incredible story.

She was born on November 21, 1834 into a Quaker family of whaling merchants living in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Whale oil was the fossil fuel of its day, Ms. Wallach said, and the family was extremely wealthy.

Before she reached age 2, Green’s neurotic mother, Abby, gave birth to another child, Issac, who died just weeks later. Her father, Edward, in a fit of rage that his first-born was a girl, sent his young daughter to live with her grandfather and spinster aunt—and Abby didn’t stop him.

“It was a rough childhood,” Ms. Wallach said, “and what she learned from that was the only way she could gain her father’s love and her grandfather’s as well, I think, was to earn it. And so by age 8, she went downtown and opened her own savings account and that became a great story in the family, that little Hetty had done that.”

Following her father’s advice, Ms. Green invested her money, loaned at interest and never borrowed a cent. At age 20, he gave her $1,200 for a new wardrobe when she moved to Manhattan. The shrewd spender used only $200 of it and banked the rest.

As she grew older, Ms. Green ignored the herd mentality and took advantage of financial panics and crises, Ms. Wallach said. When everyone else was selling, she bought railroads, real estate and government bonds. When everyone else was buying, she cashed in.

Her business attitude got her noticed, but not in a positive way.

Men mocked her and women scoffed her frugal practices while passing judgment on her big, black dresses and funny strut—which were commonplace in New England, Ms. Wallach said. Ms. Green steered clear of the upper crust and never planted roots in Manhattan, to avoid paying property taxes, she said.

“She understood the basics of investing. She was a gutsy, courageous woman who was willing to go against the crowd,” Ms. Wallach said. “She really studied hard. This was no fluke. The ‘Witch of Wall Street’ title, I think it came because she was a woman and men were envious of that and threatened by that. Nothing new.”

Ms. Wallach laughed, and continued, “And then she wore those black dresses. It was a combination of the two, but mostly the former. No man wants to be bested by a woman, certainly not in those days, and outsmarted by her.”

It was only the writers who spent time with Ms. Green who seemed to like her, Ms. Wallach said. Her independence, outspokenness and disdain for the socialite lifestyle earned her a nasty reputation in newspapers, especially when she filed a lawsuit against her spinster aunt’s estate when it didn’t pay out the fortune she was promised.

“She was the only heir to the family fortune, which did not go directly to her, to her great disappointment and despair,” Ms. Wallach said. “It was mostly put in trust so she could only invest the income on the money, which infuriated her and set her on a long legal case against her aunt’s estate and against her father’s trustees. And she proved her worth by taking the sum she did inherit directly and growing that enormously, doing a far better job than the trustees did on the money that they were in charge of.”

Ms. Green soon became the largest individual lender to the New York City government, Ms. Wallach said, and at the time of her death in 1916, she was worth at least $100 million—equivalent to about $2.5 billion today.

“If she thought you were out to get her money or befriended her because you wanted to be close to her money, she could be scathing,” Ms. Wallach said. “If she thought you were somebody who just liked her, or wanted to be friends with her, or respected her and wanted to do business in an even-handed way, then she was fine. She would be very fair to deal with.”

Her husband, Edward Green, learned that lesson the hard way. Ms. Green, who married at age 33, kicked Mr. Green out of their home in 1885 after he sank her money into his own risky interests.

“He crossed the red line,” Ms. Wallach said. “The prenuptial agreement said they would live on his income. Her money would not be touched. And he went and used it as collateral on his speculations. And so, when his stocks went tumbling, when his bonds went tumbling and they called for collateral, she had to pay up almost $800,000. She was livid and said, ‘Uh uh, this was the one area you were not supposed to go near, and aside from all the other stuff that I didn’t like, like you fooling around with other women, this is it.’ So she threw him out and then they remained friends. It was interesting.”

After their son, Ned, and daughter, Sylvia, died, there were no heirs to raise the family flag, Ms. Wallach said. Ms. Green hadn’t set up any institutions—no libraries, no museums, no foundations. Instead, her children diluted the estate by spreading their mother’s money around to benefit a variety of churches, libraries and hospitals, as well as willing portions to non-direct relatives and friends.

Ms. Green’s name evaporated from the headlines and faded into history. But her wisdom—sometimes passed on from mothers to daughters, Ms. Wallach said—lives on. “Watch your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves,” Green often said, as well as, “What man has done, women can do.”

For more information, visit janetwallach.com.